This post might seem a little all over the place. I’m tired and excited and I’m still recovering a bit from how awesome my birthday ended up being. This evening I went to a Halloween hot yoga class dressed as Wonder Woman. It was SO fun. I was so impressed with the soundtrack. It was choreographed to our yoga practice! I’m a little yoga high as well.

Anyways, today I’m here to share another Halloween event I went to. It was an all vegan Halloween Party hosted by the nonprofit group Rhode Island Vegan Awareness (RIVA).

Of course, I went dressed as a unicorn:

Since I know most of you are here for Vegan Month of Food, I figure I’ll talk about the food first. When we arrived, the tables had a smattering of delicious vegan gummy candy from Surf Sweets all over them and some chips and hummus. We had dinner soon after, and there was a gluten-free option that I had. It was pasta, pizza, and salad and they gave us a lot of it! There was the option for seconds too, but I was pretty full. Towards the end of the night, they passed out 2 packages of Justin’s Peanut Butter cups to each guest. It was awesome! I had been refraining from buying them the week before because I had heard a rumor we were getting them at the party.

The event was planned as a fundraiser for a vegan billboard that will be put up in Providence. This party was able to fund it and I’m excited to see it.

RIVA’s president is also named Laura. Together we make two vegan Lauras. She went as Belle from Beauty and the Beast alongside…well…her partner the Beast. Haha. Here’s a picture of the two vegan Lauras together. “The Beast” took our photo! Thanks!

RIVA did a great job organizing and running the party! Not only did we have food, but there was a cover band, vegan vendors, dancing, a trivia and costume contest, and raffles. I also got an astrology reading done in honor of my birthday. She gave me some great advice based on my chart and shared lots of stuff about me that helped confirm some life stuff I’ve been considering taking action on. I am going to keep it cryptic for now, but maybe I will talk about it sometime in the future. I was really glad I got to see and talk to her.

Oh! There was also a really awesome spoken word performance by my new friend, who I happened to carpool with after Laura had asked if someone could help with a ride for them. The piece was about how annoying it is to be asked, “where do you get your protein?” Even though most of us vegans often complain about hearing that question, the performance was still really inventive, funny, and well put together.

Oh! and there was a couple that dressed as B-12 and won the best vegan themed Halloween costume! I got such a kick out of it! If you go to RIVA’s facebook page and look at the pictures of the event, you might see them, amongst some other really awesome costumes! RIVA’s Facebook.

Anyways, I’m super tired from all this activity lately. I really hope I am able to post my last Vegan MoFo 2017 post tomorrow about the vegan Trunk or Treat event, but if I get home too late it might be a challenge. If I don’t make it in time, I will post November 1st, even though it won’t be the same.

Shh, don’t tell Fluffy this, but I have some bad news. I didn’t realize until yesterday that there is already a famous body-positive unicorn named Fluffy. I’ve never seen it, but supposedly they are in a Despicable Me movie. So, I feel like I will need to change their name in order to publish my book without problems. If anyone has some good ideas for unicorny ideas, let me know! I’m going to do a big brainstorm and I want it to be something more creative than Fluffy and perhaps a bit less frou-frou sounding, but also short and sweet. A challenge!

Anyways, I missed posting yesterday because I was busy getting ready to attend a vegan Halloween party last night! I had a great time, it was so much fun, and I was able to post a Halloween themed Instagram photo of some cookies I made earlier in the month. Check it out on IG @bananacurlvegangirl.

The next few days of posts are going to be Halloween themed. Tomorrow I will do the recap of the party, and hopefully, if I can make time to post before midnight, on Halloween I will be doing a recap of the vegan Trunk or Treat event I am doing.

Then Vegan MoFo will be done for the year! This year’s experience has been awesome. Thank you to everyone who has liked my posts, commented, or followed me on social media! I know I’ve mostly been posting unicorn stuff on this blog’s Instagram account, but after MoFo is over I’m going to go back to posting all my unicorn stuff on a separate account I made @unicorns.eat.vegan. The blog’s account will go back to posting more general vegan foods and baked goods. So be sure to follow the unicorn account if you wanna see where this project ends up going.

Anyways, today’s post is all about ME!! What, is it my birthday? Yes! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

The picture above is the most epic card from my brother. Let’s give him a shoutout, because he also helped me execute my design for the Vegan Food Should Be Fun graphic that I like to post:

Yesterday’s theme was brunch, but I did that today. With my mom. At my favorite vegetarian restaurant that almost everything can be made vegan at. The Grange in Providence, RI. I totally cheated on my limiting gluten and went all out by ordering the chickun fried seitan and waffles, pictured below.

Omg, it was so good. And since I’m kind of sick of cake from this month of food, we got a pumpkin glazed vegan donut for later to go. I haven’t looked at it yet, but maybe I will post it later on IG.

I also went to the mall and got some workout clothes and Lush cosmetics goodies. Oh, and a Lavender iced tea from Teavana.

I’m kinda taking it easy now because I’m super tired from last night. I did some relaxing, tarot card reading, and other mellow stuff. Now I am writing a blog and later we shall go out to eat again. I’ve only had one meal so far today, but that one meal was amazing!!

Tomorrow I also plan to go to a hot yoga class dressed as 70s Lynda Carter style wonder woman, I cannot wait!

For this week, the theme is behind the scenes. Today, we give you a behind the scenes look at Laura’s test run of her birthday cake, as she has a birthday coming up at the end of October. However, since we’re now starting to get overwhelmed by so much cake and desserts we’ve been prepping in advance for MoFo, I think Laura has sadly decided to not make her own birthday cake on her actual birthday. She also felt a little disappointed in the way the outside of cake looked, and I’m trying to work my magic to help her feel better.

Cake decorating is not, as the saying goes “a piece of cake.” It’s actually pretty challenging! Laura’s goal was to make a cake that could show it’s easier than it looks, but now she’s not so sure since she struggled so much with it. These are important lessons for her to go through though, as it makes her stronger and helps her solve problems.

She had a great idea to make the unicorn’s hair out of cotton candy. The cotton candy is moldable and an edible version of fuzzy, fluffy hair!

She did use something that made making the five rainbow layers much easier. You can find them being sold lots of places now. They come as a set of 5 smaller cake pans for layer cakes. You only need one batch of cake (or a cake mix) to fill them all up.

She also made the decision to make an exception for using unnatural food colors this time. We wish natural colors were as vibrant and easy as these ones were. Sometimes you may want to give in and take the easier route, and as long as it’s still vegan, you’ll be okay.

The inside of the cake sure is a beauty! Tommorrow we’ll be sharing some of our best tips for making rainbow frosting effects.

Thanks to this recipe for cake batter butter, I discovered that vegan butter extract exists, and started going a little overboard making all things cake batter.

Then I decided to make a raspberry cake batter smoothie.

It’s basically two cups nondairy milk, a scoop of vanilla protein powder (I use Vega Essentials), 1/3 cup frozen raspberries, one banana, 1/2 tsp vegan butter extract, 1/2 tsp almond extract, and 2 tsp vanilla extract. I also added in some vegan sprinkles, So Delicious coco whip to make it creamier (about 1/3 cup in the smoothie, and more for the topping), and drank it out of a fun straw. If you make the nut butter, you can also add a tablespoon or two into the blender.

Enjoy!

PS: If you like vegan, gluten free, soy free, and protein packed waffles, check out the new Fitquick birthday cake flavor…I haven’t tried it yet but I love their stuff and can’t wait until I can!

For my 30th birthday, which happens to be today, I had a bunch of fun stuff planned. The biggest thing was my run last weekend, in which I lived up to my blog’s name, and ran in a banana suit in the Providence (RI) Monster Dash 5k. I made a PR by about 2 minutes and it was soooo fun running in this costume:

It was a big hit with kids, especially. When I ran through the large crowd of people cheering us on, so many kids along the way would exclaim “there goes the banana!” And many of them put their little hands out to catch a high five from me as I ran past them…it was so cute. I waved to several of them, and even had a trifecta of 3 little kids put their hands out all at once that made me feel like I was a celebrity working the crowd. Haha. So that was cool, and I also plan to use this banana suit for more things for this blog, to make it funnier. You’ll see what is in store for it soon!

This morning, I made birthday cake waffles. I had some left over chocolate sauce from my candy apples and some strawberry syrup left from the strawberry frosted donut recipe that I put on top. Yum.

¼ cup vegan non-pareille sprinkles (read label, I was able to find one without the confectioner’s glaze that’s in most sprinkles at my regular local grocery store, and instead has carnauba wax.

Directions:

Mix all ingredients together and follow waffle iron’s directions to cook them. Makes about 5 waffles depending on your maker.

The batter

Tonight my family is making me a vegan vanilla cake, with raspberry filling and chocolate buttercream. I am making vegan crockpot buffalo ranch lasagna from this recipe for my dinner. I will share pictures later in a new post, maybe.

Also, I got three new cookbooks for my birthday present:

So far I have looked in Chloe’s book the most, and I was seriously drooling after that. I will be cooking out of these for awhile in the next few weeks I think, so get ready for me sharing some reviews and pictures! 🙂

Since Vegan MoFo ended, and then I wrapped up my first term at school, I’ve just needed a bit of a break from blogging. I’ll be back more regularly soon, I promise!

My birthday is next Wednesday! I’m turning 30! Aaaaaaah! In honor of the event, tomorrow I am running a 5k, and I hope to share some pictures of that, because they will contain a special (and hilarious) surprise for those who don’t know what I’m up to yet.

I also have a special recipe I created for my birthday to share, as well!

In the meantime, here is a picture of mostly raw candy apples I made from a recipe in Vegan Health and Fitness Magazine!

I am still recovering from the weekend where I was very busy…I cannot believe it’s been a week already since the start of the Ladies Rock Camp. It went really well, especially the food, from my standpoint. Well of course everything went well, but I was focused most on making sure the food was great, and I think it was.

Anyhow! I think I am going to play catch up a bit.

This week I made some Hawaiian Toast (Page 44) for breakfast and Texas Beefless Skewers with Chipotle Peach Glaze (Page 140) from Betty Goes Vegan, pizza english muffins and easy monkey bread (from the Vegan Stoner Cookbook, haha) with a friend, a really good salad several times, and a jackfruit/northern beans “tuna” melt. I don’t have pictures of the monkey bread and pizza English Muffins, sadly…

Bye bye, chickpea untuna sandwiches! This combination beats chickpea faux tuna sandwiches by a landslide! So good and a close flavor from what I remember! I didn’t add any salt and it was recommended to me to not use a whole lemon. I did not use the frying step as listed because it seemed fairly redundant. I just broiled some bread with spinach, tomatoes, and daiya cheddar on it and then put the still hot sandwich mixture inside. The un’tuna salad tastes good when cold the next day, too. Also, I don’t know how this makes just two sandwiches! It makes about 4 for me. If I piled the amount it’d take to halve the recipe on the bread, it wouldn’t hold it all. But this is probably one of my favorite recipes using jackfruit I’ve tried so far.

I rate this recipe:

Hawaiian French Toast from Betty Goes Vegan Cookbook

This cookbook has so many amazing sounding recipes, especially for breakfasts. This one immediately caught my eye when I read it. It has both a tropical and cheesy flavor to it, and works out really well when you follow the directions as instructed. I would not change anything about it! It’s so yummy. My non-vegan brother gobbled it up, and I don’t even think he likes French Toast type things much, but no complaints…This definitely deserves a 5 good banana rating!

I used Gardein Beefless tips as directed for this recipe. It looks almost too real, which is slightly scary for me. They were oh so tasty, though! I made some cilantro lime rice with corn in it (a frozen prepared bag, haha) to go along with it and it was delicious! When I shared this picture on facebook, it seemed to get more “likes” than usual…I do not know if maybe it is because it looks so convincing as a fake meat, or what, but yeah…It was also pretty quick and easy to make. I am finding that most of the recipes I have tried so far in this cookbook are, which is great and a huge plus for me. The only thing I would recommend with this particular recipe that wasn’t mentioned in the book is to have a baking pan on the rack underneath in case the juices drip out…it was needed and I thankfully thought of it before it was too late…

Cheezburger Pie from Betty Goes Vegan

Well, this was amazing. I used Whole Foods Brand burgers and did not defrost them and they worked fine. The Bisquick and the ener-g egg replacer make this almost quiche-like…which I was very impressed with. I have not been too keen on ener-g egg replacer powder until I used this cookbook and particularly this recipe. I ate it with ketchup, dill relish, and yellow mustard. It was comforting. Amazingly, when I calculated the nutrition facts it was fairly decent (at least calorie wise, I was thinking this would be really intense). Visually it is appealing too as you can see, haha!

Finally, I amnot going to review them because I’m mostly tired now, but I will leave you with some pictures of the cupcakes for my birthday on October 29 which I neglected to blog about. They were from Chloe’s Kitchen.